Weekend Box Office: Disney closer to affording real-life Emerald City

There was reason for Disney to feel some anxiety going into the opening weekend of Oz The Great And Powerful: Box office to this point in 2013 has been dismal, with the mediocre Melissa McCarthy comedy Identity Thief the only true breakout hit; another $200 million fantasy, Jack And The Giant Slayer, had tanked badly the weekend before; and reviews of the film have been largely unkind and of the blood-in-the-water variety. But $80.2 million later—and another $70 million overseas—the company brass could celebrate, perhaps by treating themselves to a wild four-day learning bender at Epcot Center. (Poor Jack And The Giant Slayer, competing for the same family audience, dropped an astonishing 63%, putting it on pace to flop worse than John Carter.) Meanwhile, the poorly received Colin Ferrell/Noomi Rapace thriller Dead Man Down, from the director of the Swedish The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, sputtered into four place on opening weekend with just $5.35 million in receipts.

In limited release, Roadside Attractions scored a minor success with the Matthew Fox-Tommy Lee Jones war movie Emperor, passing the million-dollar threshold on 260 screens with a respectable $4,012 per screen. Nick Offerman’s virtual residency at the Music Box in Chicago over the weekend paid off big time for Somebody Up There Likes Me, which had by far the strongest per screen average at $38,500—but unless Offerman multiplies and does Q&As at arthouses across the country, it’s likely that number will drop precipitously on subsequent weekends. In other news, the Michel Gondry experiment The We And The I enjoyed a solid $12,300 on one screen and Beyond The Hills, Cristian Mungiu’s follow-up to 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days, collected $6,000 per screen on three screens.